Since the scales of the buildings are bigger and bigger, the altitudes thereof are higher and higher and the structures thereof are more and more complicated, the conventional fire fighting facilities have not been able to ensure the safety thereof. For example, the conventional fire detector cannot effectively detect a fire in high and large areas or the outdoors, and even in the indoors, it has drawbacks such as slow reaction and high cost since a large number of sensors, wiring and controlling systems need to be installed. But a video-based detection system can solve those problems.
Video-based flame detection systems have some advantages, such as short response time, wide detection area, immediately-confirmable scene of a fire and ease for maintenance. These systems use cameras to acquire streaming videos, and then analyze that if a flame object exists in the monitored area. For example, the U.S. Pat. No. 6,937,743B2 disclosed a method and a monitoring system for detecting fire events in a specified area by analyzing the color variation of a plurality of images.
At present, most video-based or image-based techniques for fire detection are based on color features and/or temporally flicking frequency analyses and then to classify whether an extracted object is a flame. However, there always exists contradiction between computation burden and detection performance among those existing methodologies. Therefore, an effective video-based analysis method for detecting a fire is essential while discriminating flame objects from non-flame ones in the images. The present method significantly accelerates the response time, reduces the computation effort of detection algorithm, and improves the efficiency of detection rate.